I'm still having strange issues here. I will post a video shortly to demonstrate, but I am still getting significant lag on all clip thumbnails (all tabs) loading, as well as all media spooling up for playback. Both the application and the media are booting from Samsung 860 EVO SSDs which have been confirmed to be operating perfectly with no errors reported and reading/writing around 500/530.

To reiterate, none of this seemed to be a problem before I switched out my EVGA RTX 2070 for my Radeon VII. I'm currently running the 19.5.2 AMD driver pack, and all other applications seem to be running smoothly aside from Resolve. All hard drives in the system have not reported any errors.

I would say that from initial application load up (which hangs on a white screen for a few seconds), it takes about 10 to 20 seconds for me to have access to any media in my viewer or record monitor, and the thumbnails take even longer to populate. The project I have been using to test this contains a small amount of media in a DNxHD format.

I'm also seeing lag when I wipe a still across the viewer for comparison. Comparing it to a friend's less powerful iMac, his viewer wipe felt smooth and fluid compared to mine.

Currently running Resolve 16 b 4, but again, these issues started on Resolve 15 when I changed GPUs.

(original post)Hi everyone,

I've run into a strange issue that I hope to fix up soon.

I recently swapped out an RTX 2070 for a Radeon VII, but I'm finding that not only do my media files, thumbnails, and Resolve tabs open more slowly now, but playback lags a little while working with fairly easy codecs and only a few basic corrections and some OpenFX like glow and sharpening.

I used DDU to fully uninstall Nvidia drivers from my computer and used CCleaner to clean up the registry. I then installed the Radeon drivers and all seemed well. However, I did notice that my computer (which boots from SATA III SSD) takes a few seconds longer.

And then in Resolve preferences, I made sure I was running OpenCL and selected the Radeon for compute.

But, something seems to be amiss since I'm now getting slower UI performance and slower media loading. I'm also getting occasional playback stutter that didn't exist with the RTX 2070.

EDIT: I'm running AMD's 19.5.1 driver.

In addition, I fully uninstalled Desktop Video (I'm running a Decklink Mini Monitor 4K to a ref monitor) and Resolve, and then reinstalled Desktop Video and the latest version of 15 (15.3.1). This did not solve the lag issues.

All drives scanned for errors--no errors found. I still went ahead and optimized all drives in the system.

Problem persists. When the Resolve project opens and I switch to the edit tab, it takes about :35 to :45 for an image to pop up on the record monitor from the playhead. Really unusual behavior.

General playback with color adjustments and OpenFX plug-ins seems to be running smoothly with h.264 and RED 5K on the edit page, but in the Color tab, I get a lag or even stutter at edit points that I wasn't noticeably getting with the RTX 2070.

I should also add that I haven't been using render cache or optimized media for this particular test, since the footage I'm using for the test previous ran beautifully without these optimizations. Maybe I'm just being too picky, but the slow GUI response and slow image loading concerns me.

I switched over to 16 beta today just to see how the AMD GPU decoding would assist. Playback seems perfect on the edit tab. CPU usage around 9% while GPU sits around 6% on playback.

Is it normal for the loading of the UI on the Color tab to lag things a little bit at each edit point? This seems to have happened to me from version 12 on.

I'm also noticing a general lagging effect when I scrub through footage using the jog keys. This seems to happen from any hard drive I use for the media storage, and it's also something that used to work more smoothly when I had the RTX 2070 installed.

Again, I still have the issue of media taking about 35 seconds after the project loads before I can actually see and play anything on the timeline. This wasn't happening before I switched GPUs and drivers.

After cleaning up the registry and Windows files, I went from a 23 second reboot to 17 seconds. Things are moving smoothly! Thank you for the tip about Glary.

I tracked the times for Resolve boot as well as media loading. Before the Glary cleanup, Resolve was taking about 40 sec to boot to the Project page and now hits that in 28 sec. Previously, for the media to become visible either in the media tab or the edit tab, it took about 45 sec. Now it's getting there at 14 sec.

Much, much better than before. Unfortunately, after something pops up in the record monitor of the edit tab, I still see a significant lag from hitting play to when some video actually spools up--about 15 to 20 seconds. And it's still occasionally hanging on playback then catching up.

However, I am able to scrub through the footage with the jog keys smoothly now without hiccups or stalling. This is with all color nodes still enabled, by the way.

I have run Glary's tools for cleaning up Windows file system, registry, disk cleanup, etc. The PC itself runs beautifully, and other programs seem to have no trouble accessing data from all drives, including various USB external drives.

However, Resolve still has trouble communicating with internal and external drives to load up media onto edit and color tabs (the whole software, really).

I have also performed sfc /scannow Windows file integrity scans and have found no errors. I have also found no errors on any drives and have optimized them all. I have also run AJA's System Disk Check to make sure all drives are reading/writing (not including disk cache), and all seems fine there.

To reiterate, this is all running on same hardware from a week ago EXCEPT new GPU, and things ran perfectly fine with no lagging issues previously (except a sound issue, which I'll mention).

Is any of this possibly an issue with Radeon VII being so new and both Resolve 15.3.1 and 16 beta 2 not being optimized for Vega II hardware, or am I missing something?

As well, I am also experiencing an issue where I have sound on the timeline, the track is NOT muted, the entire sound mixer is NOT muted or turned down, and my correct audio output is selected in Resolve preferences, and sometimes I can't get audio playback. Restarting Resolve usually fixes it.

Feeling more and more like bugs the more I test it. Just can't figure out why Resolve is lagging on media loading.

im getting the same thing with my radeon 7 but im stuck with 19.3.1 drivers because if i update the drivers past this point it wont launch davinci resolve ive been trying DR 15 and now am trying 16b4 and playback of video is very laggy. i (upgraded) from a gtx970 thinking that going from 3.5gb vram to 16gb would help with my gh5 4k footage

everything about my computer is the same as it was with the lesser graphics card but performance has decreased

Blankoutcast wrote:im getting the same thing with my radeon 7 but im stuck with 19.3.1 drivers because if i update the drivers past this point it wont launch davinci resolve ive been trying DR 15 and now am trying 16b4 and playback of video is very laggy. i (upgraded) from a gtx970 thinking that going from 3.5gb vram to 16gb would help with my gh5 4k footage

everything about my computer is the same as it was with the lesser graphics card but performance has decreased

Blankoutcast wrote:im getting the same thing with my radeon 7 but im stuck with 19.3.1 drivers because if i update the drivers past this point it wont launch davinci resolve ive been trying DR 15 and now am trying 16b4 and playback of video is very laggy. i (upgraded) from a gtx970 thinking that going from 3.5gb vram to 16gb would help with my gh5 4k footage

everything about my computer is the same as it was with the lesser graphics card but performance has decreased

How interesting, Blankoutcast. I'm on the latest AMD driver 19.5.2 and I'm not having any trouble in any other applications or in general system performance aside from media and thumbnails taking a painfully long time to load in Resolve. And yeah, on paper, you made a big upgrade in terms of GPU performance, so the issues you're having seem really strange.

Last edited by joncoy on Wed Jun 12, 2019 11:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

But Resolve 15.3 was opening projects quite smoothly while my RTX 2070 was installed. When I uninstalled the drivers (used DDU) and installed the Radeon VII and its drivers, Resolve suddenly seemed sluggish to open and to load media. Playback, however, is great once all media loads.

Thanks Misha, I’ll give Adrenaline 19.6.1 a go. I thought I was up to date with mobo BIOS and chipset drivers when I installed Radeon VII, but I’ll look into that as well. Think I’m at least on latest BIOS 4801.

Hi People,I'm happy that I found this thread. Thank you for all your hard work in trying to fix this problem.My symptoms are identical: Laggy playback (and gui) going from Nvidia 1080 to Radeon Vii. I'll try all these remedies and more and report back if I discover any solution.First I'm going to try this weeks gpu driver: 19:6:1I hope I'm posting this correctly. Not much experience on forums.

Bill Heath wrote:Hi People,I'm happy that I found this thread. Thank you for all your hard work in trying to fix this problem.My symptoms are identical: Laggy playback (and gui) going from Nvidia 1080 to Radeon Vii. I'll try all these remedies and more and report back if I discover any solution.First I'm going to try this weeks gpu driver: 19:6:1I hope I'm posting this correctly. Not much experience on forums.

Updated resolve to 16b4

Hey Bill!

Thanks for posting as another user with this lag issue. Let us know how things progress. I installed the latest driver version 19.6.1 and have seen little to no change in performance system-wide as well as in Resolve. My drives (even SSD) take a considerable amount of time in Resolve to load media into the pool and thumbnails.

My hunch is that, like Misha pointed out, there is a driver conflict somewhere in my system that is causing a lag.

MishaEngel wrote:Blackmagic Design turns out to be a status driven company (NVidia, Apple), while their own products are value for money(Like AMD).

I dont agree with this at all. Until Ryzen came out, Intel rulled the pc cpu world. Nvidia still rules the pc gpu world, even withe latest Navi releases. Thus it only makes sense BM would focus on what their customers are most likely going to be running.

Same issue as above. Everything up to date BIOS/GPU Firmware(clean installed) specs in signature might not be up to date (16b4/newest AMD Drivers) but will once i'm in the office. UI delay not happening in any other application. Footage is loading off an NVME. I've tested with BRAW, CDNG, and Prores and they all have the delay.

Sidenote (probably unrelated):One thing I noticed that is specific to BRAW is that while GPU decode is on it take several moments for the framerate of the timeline to catch up. With it off it starts at the correct frame rate almost immediately.

That state of hopeful uncertainty will probably be news to anyone who bought this card at your repeated urging. But I guess it's even more urgent to buy now. If it doesn't work, at least you got a bargain.

That state of hopeful uncertainty will probably be news to anyone who bought this card at your repeated urging. But I guess it's even more urgent to buy now. If it doesn't work, at least you got a bargain.

Apple Mac Pro gives me high hopes, it uses the same VEGA2 chip.In the high unlikely case that AMD and BMD won't solve this problem(they solved it with VEGA), I can always sell them to some Apple users(they have a lot of money), or run hackintosh (haven't heard any issues on MacOS 10.14.5 with this card).

Those NVidia cards with 16GByte or more are to costly and to slow with TNR.And it's competitor the RTX2080 with 8GB or slow VRAM is not a real option for 4..6k workflows.

I made a short video and tried to replicate the processes that the OP is having issues with. The video shows the following- Navigating to the media, Resolve generating thumbnails, playing back an h.265 clip, creating a frame grab in the Color tab and then applying a wipe with it.As you can see from the FPS counter, playback remained steady throughout. *Note- this is a new machine and has only been used for a few tests previously.

joncoy wrote:I’m almost curious enough to move back temporarily to see what happens.

It's worth doing. I would also try backing the system up and doing a bare metal reinstall to see if that fixes things with the Radeon VII.

I’ll give this a try if things don’t improve soon. Considering it’s only slow when the software first loads everythig and not on playback, it might be a bit hasty.

And Andrew, I see what you mean by it loading well. I may give some older drivers a shot. At this point, I may need to just be patient and let BMD work potential kinks out. Again, the Radeon VII performs well in all other applications, and it performs even better in Blender than my RTX 2070 with the Creator drivers. So we’ll see. the only other issue I have noticed since switching GPUs is that Windows boots to the desktop a few seconds slower on average than before (17 sec has now become 23 sec).

Dan Sherman wrote:Whats really odd, is what you describe sounds like a hdd related issue.

Have you run somthing like hwmonitor during start up?

Have tried deleting or moving your cache directory?

Another test might be to use ffmpeg to transcode some h264 footage and see how that performs.

Hey Dan, I haven't run HWMonitor, but I was using Glary to help diagnose some issues and clean up the registry a bit. Unfortunately, Glary would occasionally give me incorrect readings regarding boot times, so I'm not sure if that was on Glary software or something else.

I have moved my cache directory to a different SSD. I'm going to shuffle some media around as well just to try other drives.

So today, I learned a bit about HBCC memory segment function on the Radeon VII (in the Radeon software), so I decided to kick it on, at its default memory amount, to see what happens. I restarted the PC, booted Resolve, and from the database window to initial application loading and then to media and thumbnails, everything loaded VERY quickly, like 1-2 seconds.

I'm stunned. I had no idea about HBCC and what it can do for system performance beyond utilizing more RAM beyond the 16GB VRAM.

As of right now, running Adrenalin 19.6.1 with HBCC activated, my Resolve interface feels responsive and snappy again. Very weird.

Hopefully this is all that's necessary. I'm still a little confused why it sped things up--I was under the impression that it was just a way to restructure VRAM by using system RAM as an extension if VRAM fills up, which I'm clearly not doing with my Resolve project.

Regardless, it has sped my OS and applications up a bit. I need to do more research.

Cliff Rourke wrote:joncoy, thank you for running your hardware headache to ground- one step at a time in this forum. I've learned a lot along the way, which is nice. The Vii gpu is high on my list of new graphics cards.

joncoy wrote:So today, I learned a bit about HBCC memory segment function on the Radeon VII (in the Radeon software), so I decided to kick it on, at its default memory amount, to see what happens. I restarted the PC, booted Resolve, and from the database window to initial application loading and then to media and thumbnails, everything loaded VERY quickly, like 1-2 seconds.

I'm stunned. I had no idea about HBCC and what it can do for system performance beyond utilizing more RAM beyond the 16GB VRAM.

As of right now, running Adrenalin 19.6.1 with HBCC activated, my Resolve interface feels responsive and snappy again. Very weird.

Thanks joncoy!! You saved me having to rebuild my system. I was going to return the card too and spend an extra grand on the 2080ti. I turned on the HBCC, and that changed everything in Resolve. 4k Video is playing back well, and the UI is responsive.

My system specs are almost identical to yours.

Again, I think this solved the performance bottleneck for me. And saved me time and frustration.

Bill Heath wrote:Thanks joncoy!! You saved me having to rebuild my system. I was going to return the card too and spend an extra grand on the 2080ti. I turned on the HBCC, and that changed everything in Resolve. 4k Video is playing back well, and the UI is responsive.

My system specs are almost identical to yours.

Again, I think this solved the performance bottleneck for me. And saved me time and frustration.

Cheers!

Happy to hear it, Bill! I'm still reading up on the impact of HBCC and why it's working, but I'm going through my own workstation to find any other loose ends I can dig up regarding performance, but this is a great start. Hopefully maturing drivers (and Resolve versions) will only improve things.

There is one last issue that I'm experiencing with the radeon vii (in DR 16b4 Studio): There is a checkbox for h264/h265 hardware acceleration in the prefs. Clicking that pref DOES improve playback and rendering of h264 files, but turns h265 files green (much like the green clips in the free version). So resolve studio and AMD are (almost) working together in h265. I suspect future updates will address this.Maybe there's a separate thread about this h265/amd issue?

Bill Heath wrote:There is one last issue that I'm experiencing with the radeon vii (in DR 16b4 Studio): There is a checkbox for h264/h265 hardware acceleration in the prefs. Clicking that pref DOES improve playback and rendering of h264 files, but turns h265 files green (much like the green clips in the free version). So resolve studio and AMD are (almost) working together in h265. I suspect future updates will address this.Maybe there's a separate thread about this h265/amd issue?

Hardware encoding is crap compared to software encoding (both AMD and NVidia, NAVI and Turing are better, but still not on the level of software encoding).

Bill Heath wrote:Thanks joncoy!! You saved me having to rebuild my system. I was going to return the card too and spend an extra grand on the 2080ti. I turned on the HBCC, and that changed everything in Resolve. 4k Video is playing back well, and the UI is responsive.

My system specs are almost identical to yours.

Again, I think this solved the performance bottleneck for me. And saved me time and frustration.

Cheers!

Happy to hear it, Bill! I'm still reading up on the impact of HBCC and why it's working, but I'm going through my own workstation to find any other loose ends I can dig up regarding performance, but this is a great start. Hopefully maturing drivers (and Resolve versions) will only improve things.

This made all the difference in the world. Thumbnails and footage display just about instantly .